5 players play two races (cyborg deleted- or one race anyway)simultaneously. The obvious challenge is to make two races work together and make the best of their individual advantages. we thought it was a way to quickly experience many races as well.

Option 1; Random races / random locations

Option 2; Random races/ Adjoining locations

Things to consider

Are there any race combination's that shouldn't be allowed?
Adjoining locations give a wide home area.
Random location means someone could end up next to themselves or fighting two separate fronts or in the big squeeze. I like the idea of adjoining areas /random races....

Whow, that would be a serious challenge for Bird & Empire. Fed Virgos with free fighters on team 1, Lizards hissing Borg planets and Lizard Biocides on team 2, Vicky/Rush combo with poppers and free fighters on team 4, webs plus mines and a Diamond Flame / Golem combo with free fighters on team 5.

Team 3 has a Darkwing / Gorbie combo, and some nasty trickery with SSDs plus cloakers, but will have a very hard time to collect and buy enough fighters for any serious combat. They'd need some economic strengthening to balance things out.

I really enjoyed the 'Evolutionary war' 3x3 teamgame back in the day over at Lord Firefall's Lair. Granted, it was my own idea so I'm biased, but here's the deal:

Team 1 are Humans: Feds, Rebels and Colonies.
Team 2 are Deviants: Lizards, Birds and Fascists.
Team 3 are Machines: Borg, Empire and Robots.

To balance out the teams, the following changes have to be made:
- Firecloud chunnel is disabled
- Cobol does not scoop fuel
- No Ion Storms
- Loki does not decloak ships
- Lizards start with two probes without beams
- Birds and Fascists get a 125% mining rate
- Cost of cloaking lowered to 2kts per 100kt hullmasss
- Birdmen have groundcombat ratios equal to the Fascists

We've only played the scenario once, and if memory serves that game did not yet have all of the above Hconfig changes.

Team 3 seems like they would have zero answer for team 1. Team 1 can have fed virgos/rushes, Have an economic advantage, and can produce ships far more efficiently with the refit option, mines are useless.

I suppose team 2 could use a hit and run tactic with DW under lizard control and pop ships, but seems like they would also struggle with only having the madon as a fighter ship. At least they have popers.. but they would need a lot of them. They also lack any HYP ship to quickly move funds like the other teams.

edit:
Seems to me you would probably be best off disabling the fed refit option. To me that is a massive advantage. Only having to tech up a base to tech 10 to throw a hull into production is a pretty big advantage. Yes, team 3 can do it and tow the fighter ships into combat with other ships. But that isn't an option for team 2 and its a big risk for team 3 since team 2 can pick off towing ships.